Most undervalued

Upstart is still priced like a leveraged bet on interest rates and consumer credit. When borrowing costs rise or defaults increase, lenders buy fewer loans and Upstart's marketplace can slow abruptly. Investors are also cautious because the company only recently returned to profit and still carries meaningful balance-sheet lending exposure. The bear case assumes the credit environment worsens just as loan growth cools. Our base case assumes the opposite is not necessary: credit can remain merely stable while auto and home lending grow from small bases and the core personal-loan business keeps recovering. The gap exists because the market is assigning a large macroeconomic discount to earnings that the model believes are becoming more diversified.

Investors worry Uber's growth will slow after 2028 as ride-hailing and delivery competition intensifies, while autonomous vehicles could weaken its position as the middleman between riders and drivers. The Delivery Hero acquisition also adds integration risk just as the core business is expected to mature. That caution is visible in the bear case, where bookings slow sharply and the shares fall below today's price. Our base case is more optimistic: it assumes Uber's scale keeps customers and drivers on the platform, Delivery Hero expands the addressable market, and margins improve even as growth becomes steadier. The valuation gap exists because the market appears to be pricing in a much faster slowdown than the model does.

The base case says $106.98 against a $71.46 close, and the sell-side average target of $98.71 sits in between, so this is not a case of the market disbelieving the plan outright. What it is discounting is where the plan lives. Every producing barrel Vista owns is in one Argentine basin, under one country's fiscal and currency policy, and the export duty line alone rose 188% year over year in Q2 2026 on a rate that is a political decision rather than a market one. The second thing the price is holding back for is oil. Guidance assumes Brent at 85 dollars for the rest of 2026 falling to 75 in real terms by 2028, and Vista publishes the elasticity itself: about 200 million dollars of Adjusted EBITDA for every 10 dollars a barrel across half a year. The third is simply that the plan is young. The 158, 185 and 208 Mboe/d path was filed in May 2026 and has one quarter of evidence behind it, that quarter needed an acquisition to consolidate, and the 2027 to 2028 step assumes the VMOS pipeline arrives on time in mid-2027. The bear case at $52.67 is what it looks like if Brent reverts and the tie-ins run at the bottom of the 100-110 range; the gap between that and the $171.10 bull case is the honest width of the disagreement.

Hims & Hers carries a real regulatory discount. Its weight-loss growth relied partly on compounded GLP-1 treatments, which face tighter limits now that branded drugs are more available. The FDA previously warned the company over the sale and marketing of unapproved and allegedly misbranded compounded drugs, later named Hims while announcing further enforcement, and HHS referred potential violations to the Department of Justice. No criminal charges had been filed when this model was prepared, so this is an unresolved overhang rather than established liability. Investors must still price the possibility of fines, operating restrictions, or a faster shift toward lower-margin branded drugs. The bear case captures that fear: subscribers keep growing, but regulation and drug costs prevent profits from following. Our base case assumes weight-loss margins stabilise while established specialties and newer services carry more of the growth. The valuation gap reflects a disagreement about whether Hims can become a broader healthcare platform before regulatory pressure changes its economics.

The market appears to be pricing in something close to the bear case. The credit cycle finally arrives. Delinquencies keep rising past what tax-refund seasonality explains, the provision eats the interest line, and the forward-flow market reprices the way it did in 2022 - so the gain-on-sale line does not get less profitable, it gets smaller. Funding costs stop falling. Merchant fee rates compress as volume migrates to the Card and to wallets where no merchant integration pays a network fee, and regulatory pressure on BNPL disclosure lands in the middle of it. Growth halves rather than stops, but a lender priced for growth and revalued as a lender is where most of the damage is.